80 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 2, 2019

Sherlock

Holmes

on the Couch

Nicholas Meyer returns with The Adventure of the Peculiar

Protocols, his first Sherlock Holmes novel in 26 years

By Lenny Picker

I

s your father a Freudian?”

Could that question, which 13-year-old Nicholas Meyer was asked in 1959, really

have initiated a chain of events that ended up breathing new life into two classic

fictional franchises—and even affecting U.S. nuclear weapons policy?

Causation is, of course, complicated, but it’s possible to connect the dots from that

query to Meyer’s role in Sherlock Holmes being a commercially lucrative property in 2019—

and in Ronald Reagan’s shift away from believing that nuclear war could be winnable.

These days, with Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch alternating their portrayals

of superheroes with appearances as Sherlock Holmes, a legion of fans eagerly await the next

installments in their respective series. And Holmes’s status as a firmly ensconced

popular culture icon accounts for the publication of dozens of new novels and short

stories year after year.

But it wasn’t always so, and many believe that Holmes would not be as

present in print as he is today if not for Meyer’s 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent

Solution (Dutton, 1974). Meyer, whose fourth Holmes novel, The Adventure

of the Peculiar Protocols, is being published by Minotaur in October, told PW

that he had originally set out all those years ago to write a “story about

Sherlock Holmes, not a Sherlock Holmes story.” In The Seven-Per-Cent

Solution, he had the inspired idea of having Watson trick a cocaine-

addicted Holmes into traveling to Vienna in pursuit of Professor

Moriarty, so that his addiction could be treated by Sigmund Freud

himself. The book struck a chord with readers, remaining on the New

York Times bestseller list for 40 weeks. Its popularity encouraged other

writers and publishers, leading to a boom in Sherlock Holmes books

that began in the mid-1970s and continues today.

Meyer grew up in New York City, the son of a psychiatrist, Bernard

Meyer, who supported the six-year-old Meyer’s initial attempts at

becoming a writer. “I’d dictate these stories about our dog fetching the

newspaper and transporting it from the store to our home, and my